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Before the smartphone age

Switchboard operators recall their heyday
Former Mountain Bell telephone operators – from left, Verna Louderback, Rose Janes, Willie Garnand, Mildred McCoy, Eurma Batchelor and Mary Benton – have lunch at Batchelor’s home on Tuesday. Benton, who started in 1945, is the earliest in the group who were operators from the 1940s through the early 1980s, when the office closed in Durango.

There actually was a time when people didn’t make a telephone call by dialing or using a keypad but by going through a central operator.

Verna Louderback, Rose Janes, Willie Garnand, Mildred McCoy, Eurma Batchelor and Mary Benton recalled Tuesday at one of their biweekly lunches the days when, as switchboard operators for Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph, they were the intermediary between the caller and the called.

When a light flashed on the switchboard announcing a call, the operator inserted the end of a cable into a receiving slot and said “Operator” or “Number please.” The operator then inserted another plug – the other end of the first one – to complete the circuit.

Switchboard operators relayed emergency calls to police and fire authorities, told forgetful old people and inquiring kids what day it was or played a role in long-distance calls, which in the mid-20th century included Cortez, Ignacio and Bayfield.

They could answer 50 calls an hour.

A person making a long-distance call contacted an operator at a local switchboard, who relayed the message to another operator on what was known as the B board. The B-board operator connected to a long-distance operator.

Impatient callers were irritating, the operators said. The fault was sometimes of the caller’s own making. One operator recalled being unable to find a person named Rockhouse in the directory. It turned out the last name was Stonehouse, she said.

Dial phones came into general use in Durango around 1957, they recalled.

Garnand worked for Mountain States under successive names for 37½ years – 29 in Durango and the remainder in Albuquerque.

The operators have been meeting every other week since about 1990. The main topics of conversation no longer are their days at Mountain States but grandchildren and family activities.

daler@durangoherald.com



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